Woke up today wondering if I'd imagined the election result, but no such luck. I hope they realize he's going to make them do calisthenics...
As promised, the Tale Of The Stupid Thing That Went Wrong With The Car:
Mum's a delivery driver, and as such she's in and out of the car some 80 times a day. Tuesday it suddenly decided to act up by not starting. The problem was quickly traced to the much-abused keyhole. A minor issue, you say? On the previous car, a Saturn, which also developed this problem because she'd managed to wear the notches off the key, perhaps. But apparently not on the Ford Focus, which as we had already found out during the episode with the locksmith needs special keys with microchips in -- and when the lock assembly has to be repaired, it must be taught anew to talk to its proper set of keys. So it ended up being twice as expensive and time-consuming as it reasonably ought to have been expected to be...
Kind of makes me want to chuck it all and get a bicycle. If I had a place to store a bicycle.
Editing progress: chapters 3 and 4, which is through page 66 of 243. Very pleased with results thus far... Chapter 5 may be trouble, though, because that's the part with the Obligatory Bar-Room Scene and I'm not sure what state I left the dialog in last go-round. Will try to get that out of the way before the next @!##$ ballgame.
The day's other accomplishments included more typing-up of eBay items (which I will load into the queue now for Friday launch, I think, so I won't have to interrupt my editing later), and a good technology-related repair story, to contrast with the above:
Among the things I've been tackling in the editing and cleaning of the flat are the stacks and stacks of floppies. Some of which can just go out, but some of which have to be looked at. I've been doing the looking on Mum's IIci because it's got the auto-eject drive... so, naturally, after a few hours of this, the eject broke. Disk stuck in drive, not responding to paperclip, etc... And this IIci can only communicate to the outside world via floppy, so this was a potential Issue.
BUT (and this is the cool bit), being a packrat, and not above rescuing Macs in various states of decay from situations of Duress, I happened to have on hand an extra LCII that I hadn't yet come up with a purpose for, and that I knew had a working floppy drive. So since the darn thing only had a 40-MB HD anyhow, I chopped it up. (Note that this is not the 'good' LCII that hisses at me; this is a stranger-LCII I found in a bin. Although it also hissed at me when I was checking the status of its floppy drive.) And, after a brief detour to look up the anatomical diagrams for the unexpectedly tricky insides of the IIci, drives were swapped, and the IIci is back in good working order.
Not, though, that Mum herself ever uses the floppy drive... :) But I did happen to need it again myself this very evening, when it struck me that the solution to the thorny problem of how to resolve several incompatible file-formats and plugs into a printout of the donors list was simply to take a screenshot of the data on the IIci! [smacking forehead] So I should be able to put up the 'credits' list shortly.
As promised, the Tale Of The Stupid Thing That Went Wrong With The Car:
Mum's a delivery driver, and as such she's in and out of the car some 80 times a day. Tuesday it suddenly decided to act up by not starting. The problem was quickly traced to the much-abused keyhole. A minor issue, you say? On the previous car, a Saturn, which also developed this problem because she'd managed to wear the notches off the key, perhaps. But apparently not on the Ford Focus, which as we had already found out during the episode with the locksmith needs special keys with microchips in -- and when the lock assembly has to be repaired, it must be taught anew to talk to its proper set of keys. So it ended up being twice as expensive and time-consuming as it reasonably ought to have been expected to be...
Kind of makes me want to chuck it all and get a bicycle. If I had a place to store a bicycle.
Editing progress: chapters 3 and 4, which is through page 66 of 243. Very pleased with results thus far... Chapter 5 may be trouble, though, because that's the part with the Obligatory Bar-Room Scene and I'm not sure what state I left the dialog in last go-round. Will try to get that out of the way before the next @!##$ ballgame.
The day's other accomplishments included more typing-up of eBay items (which I will load into the queue now for Friday launch, I think, so I won't have to interrupt my editing later), and a good technology-related repair story, to contrast with the above:
Among the things I've been tackling in the editing and cleaning of the flat are the stacks and stacks of floppies. Some of which can just go out, but some of which have to be looked at. I've been doing the looking on Mum's IIci because it's got the auto-eject drive... so, naturally, after a few hours of this, the eject broke. Disk stuck in drive, not responding to paperclip, etc... And this IIci can only communicate to the outside world via floppy, so this was a potential Issue.
BUT (and this is the cool bit), being a packrat, and not above rescuing Macs in various states of decay from situations of Duress, I happened to have on hand an extra LCII that I hadn't yet come up with a purpose for, and that I knew had a working floppy drive. So since the darn thing only had a 40-MB HD anyhow, I chopped it up. (Note that this is not the 'good' LCII that hisses at me; this is a stranger-LCII I found in a bin. Although it also hissed at me when I was checking the status of its floppy drive.) And, after a brief detour to look up the anatomical diagrams for the unexpectedly tricky insides of the IIci, drives were swapped, and the IIci is back in good working order.
Not, though, that Mum herself ever uses the floppy drive... :) But I did happen to need it again myself this very evening, when it struck me that the solution to the thorny problem of how to resolve several incompatible file-formats and plugs into a printout of the donors list was simply to take a screenshot of the data on the IIci! [smacking forehead] So I should be able to put up the 'credits' list shortly.